


Everything I Love Gets Lost In Drawers

by semperama



Category: Star Trek RPF
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-05
Updated: 2016-05-05
Packaged: 2018-06-06 15:25:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,176
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6759490
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/semperama/pseuds/semperama
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Chris doesn't like that Zach got cropped out of those pictures in London, but he can't quite figure out why.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Everything I Love Gets Lost In Drawers

**Author's Note:**

  * For [AnotherFraud](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AnotherFraud/gifts).



> I was lamenting that I didn't think I'd have anything done for Pinto de Mayo, and my darling Claudia helped me out by providing me a prompt regarding how Chris and Zach would feel about [Zach getting cropped out of the London pics](http://semperama.tumblr.com/post/143014908092/pine-farr-chris-and-zach-leaving-the-box). Naturally, I had to jump on that angst (and then gave it a happy ending, because, you know, PdM is srs bzns, man). 
> 
> So this is for Claudia, but it's for all of you, too. Thanks for being the best fandom ever and for letting me share bits of my heart with you. <3

It doesn’t come up, and it’s weird that it doesn’t come up. Chris sees the pictures a couple days later, sees Zach’s disembodied arm or sometimes just the barest curl of a fingertip or sometimes nothing at all, and he immediately checks his phone to make sure he hasn’t missed any texts or calls. Because this is something they would normally talk about. Zach would pretend to be offended to cover up the fact that he’s actually offended. Chris would placate him and mock him in turns. They would segue into a conversation about the fickle nature of fame and about how paparazzi are a blight that deserves to be wiped from the face of the earth. They would remind each other that they love the work, regardless of how many cameras are in their face or not in their face. It would be comfortable and comforting and grounding, all things that are in short supply these days, so if they don’t give them to each other, where are they going to find them?

But Zach hasn’t called or texted, and he doesn’t call or text in the next few days either, and it’s _weird_.

Chris tries to convince himself he’s not worrying about it, but he is—through the next several days as he wraps up filming for Wonder Woman, through the entire long, _long_ flight back to LA, through his entire first week back home. It’s like an itch at the base of his skull, just beneath the skin where he can’t get to it. He keeps feeling his phone vibrate when it hasn’t, keeps thinking he hears the text message tone and then dashing across the room to find the screen dark. _This is dumb,_ he tells himself. _You’re being dumb._ Zach probably doesn’t care. Maybe he hasn’t even seen the pictures. Maybe he has and it doesn’t bother him. 

There’s certainly no reason it should bother Chris. He’s the one _in_ the fucking shots. So what is it that’s eating at him?

He feels even dumber when Zach finally does text him out of the blue, about something completely innocuous and unrelated. _remind me how to tell if a cantaloupe is ripe?_ It’s a relief, but it’s also not. Yes, maybe he and Zach are still okay, but are they _good_? Chris almost brings it up. He almost texts back: _Smell it...and by the way, what do you think it means that you were cut out of those pictures?_ But in the end he deletes the second part, and he smiles when Zach sends back a stupid picture of himself with a melon held up to his nose, and he tells himself to let it go.

He does let it go, sort of—or at least he keeps himself busy, which is almost the same thing. It’s been a long time since he was in LA, so he has friends to catch up with and housework to do and various little affairs to set in order. Finances to go over. Letters to write (he’ll go to his grave insisting email is too impersonal). A lot of it is tedious, but it keeps him busy, and that’s all that matters. Sitting still has never been easy for him anyway, and now more than ever he doesn’t want to be alone with his thoughts.

But then, all too soon, Zach shows up on his doorstep.

There’s this fan event in town in a few days, and Zach has flown in a little early to get some other business done beforehand. He’s staying at a hotel, Chris thinks, or maybe with his brother or some other friend. There was a time when it would have been a foregone conclusion that he’d stay with Chris, but that was before he was just a floating hand on the edge of the snapshots of Chris’s life.

“Hey, man!” Zach says as he steps through the door, looking cheerful and rested and, as per usual, like a million bucks. “Tacos? Please tell me you’re in the mood for tacos.”

Chris is always in the mood for tacos, so they jump in the Benz and drive down to pick some up and bring them back to Chris’s house (Zach’s idea, and Chris doesn’t try to read too much into why he wouldn’t want to be spotted together in public right now). Zach keeps up a stream of chatter throughout the ride, filling Chris in on all the things he’s been up to since they last saw each other—the Met Gala, the plays he’s seen, the interviews he gave, the clubs he went to. It’s not out of character for Zach to run off at the mouth, but this almost seems excessive. Chris’s palms start to sweat and stick to the steering wheel. He tries to remind himself that the weirdness is all in his head.

When they get back to the house, they sit across from each other at the kitchen table and eat mostly in silence—silence that seems deafening after all the talk in the car. Chris keeps thinking about saying something to fill it, but his mind only seems to want to play one thought over and over again on loop. Every time he tries to feel around for another topic, any other topic at all, it scurries away from him before he can get a good hold on it. 

He finishes eating too quickly, and then all he has to do is watch Zach, and that’s what does him in. He can’t take it.

“So,” he says, and for a moment he feels like he’s floating outside his body, watching himself start to do something he doesn’t want to do with no way to stop it. “Umm, so, those pictures…”

Zach freezes mid-chew, his jaw cocked at an odd angle, his eyes fixed on Chris unblinkingly like he expects him to pull a gun on him or, or, Chris doesn’t want to think about the ‘or’. Not while he’s unwittingly staring at Zach’s mouth. 

Slowly, Zach swallows and puts his last bite of taco down and wipes his hands on a napkin. Only once all of that is done—it seems to take about twenty-five years to Chris—does he open his mouth to speak.

“What about them?”

Not _What pictures?_ Not _What are you talking about?_ Chris’s stomach sinks. Zach’s been thinking about it too then.

“Just, uh.” Chris laughs awkwardly and rubs the back of his neck. “It was weird, right? That they, umm, didn’t seem to recognize you. Cropped you out.”

Zach narrows his eyes. He’s still got a greasy napkin balled up in one fist. “What are you fishing for here, Chris? Are you worried I’m mad at you?”

“Not...really. I would hope you would have told me.”

“I would,” Zach says. “And I’m not.”

“But you are upset? You seem upset.” 

Zach leans back in his chair and finally drags his eyes away, rolling them up toward the ceiling like he’s looking for help up there. But there’s no help for him, and no help for Chris either. This conversation has turned into a minefield, and Chris feels like he must have ignored bright red signs and barbed wire fences to get them here.

“I’m...Well yeah, sure, I’m upset,” Zach says, still looking up. “I’m an actor, and ego kind of comes with the territory, and not being recognized is just about the only thing worse than being recognized.”

Chris snorts in mirthless understanding. As much as he hates the paparazzi, he knows he’d take it way too personally if his and Zach’s situations were reversed. He wouldn’t blame Zach, of course, but it doesn’t seem like Zach blames him. Despite the fact that he can’t look him in the eye.

“Okay,” Chris says, “so, so...you and I are good?”

The sigh the blows past Zach’s lips ruffles the few strands of hair that slipped down over his forehead while he was eating. He finally looks at Chris again, but there’s something in his eyes now that Chris doesn’t like. Not anger, not awkwardness. It’s something mournful, something that wraps its fingers around Chris’s heart and squeezes. 

“You remember,” he starts, and Chris almost wants to stop him there. He does remember. Without even knowing the rest of Zach’s sentence, he knows he’s going to remember, and he knows it’s going to hurt.

“You remember that spring I moved to New York?”

 _Like it was yesterday,_ he thinks. “Mhm,” he says instead.

“You remember you came to visit not long after?” Zach continues. “And then again a week later, and…”

“And then the paps found us,” Chris finishes. “Followed us around for a while. Annoyed the fuck out of me.”

“Yeah.” Zach looks down at his hands, and Chris looks down at them too, watching as Zach folds the paper bag his food came in around the last lonely bite of taco. The childishness of that fidgeting makes Chris feel tender. He doesn’t want to feel tender right now. He tries to focus on something else, like the bones of Zach’s wrist or the familiar dusting of hair on the back of his hand, but that doesn’t help. He could identify Zach by the pattern of that hair, he thinks. Even if he hadn’t known it was Zach’s hand in those pictures, he would have known. 

“People were speculating about us a lot,” Zach says. “You hated it.”

He gets up then, like the conversation is over, reaches across the table and grabs Chris’s trash and takes it and his own over to the bin hidden away in the pantry. All Chris can do is watch him and hope that he’ll go on without prompting. If there’s a right thing to say now, a right question to ask, Chris doesn’t know it.

But Zach doesn’t go on. He doesn’t come back and sit down either. He stops at the island and leans back against it, crossing his arms over his chest, crossing his feet at the ankles. Chris thinks he might be trying to look casual, but there is tension in every single part of his body, a muscle jumping in his jaw. Things are so out of whack somehow. Zach never looks this tense around him. Zach never clams up. 

Chris takes a deep breath and makes himself ask the question that by now he has figured out the answer to: “What does this have to do with those pictures from London?”

Bizarrely, that makes Zach laugh, though it’s not a very happy sound. His shoulders shake with it, and he uncrosses his arms so he can scrub his hand across his mouth. He’s sporting enough stubble that it makes an audible rasping sound that raises goosebumps on the back of Chris’s neck.

“Which is worse, Chris?” Zach asks. “Being recognized or not being recognized?”

He’s not talking about himself anymore. He’s talking about _them_. Chris knew this was the crux of the matter all along, maybe knew it before Zach even knocked on his door today, but now he has to confront it. There was a time when he couldn’t stand the thought of people assuming he and Zach were hooking up. There was a time where he would have seriously considered facing a lawsuit just for the satisfaction of smashing the cameras of the vultures who caught him and Zach spending time together. But now… _Which is worse?_

Chris clears his throat and places his hands flat on the table, but he can’t bring himself to stand up yet. He studies the grain in the wood as he says, “You know it doesn’t mean anything about _us_ that those idiots didn’t recognize you, right?”

“Doesn’t it?” Zach asks. “We used to be…” He trails off, and Chris looks up just in time to see him curling his pointer and middle finger around each other. “Tight. Inseparable. Now, even when I’m standing right next to you, it’s like I’m not even there.”

“But _I_ know you’re there!” Chris bursts out of his chair and steps around the table before he even knows what he’s going to do when he reaches Zach. All he knows is that the distance between them right now isn’t good. Not the physical distance and not the emotional distance. Maybe by reducing the former, he can also reduce the latter. “Why does it matter what anyone else thinks?”

“You tell me, Chris,” Zach says defensively. He’s even tenser now that Chris is standing right in front of him. “Don’t think I didn’t notice how much it’s been bothering you too. You’re the one who brought it up in the first place.”

The truth is, it’s bothering Chris for the same reasons, now that he’s letting himself think about it. They’re supposed to be ZachandChris, ChrisandZach. Sure, it was fucking stupid that the paps didn’t recognize Zach, but it was even _more_ stupid that they didn’t recognize them _together_. They’re a package deal. Everyone should know that. Everyone. 

Do he and Zach still know it? Is that the problem?

Chris sighs and turns to slump back against the counter next to Zach, close enough that their arms just barely brush. For a while, they are silent. There is a clock ticking somewhere else in the house, and through the open window Chris can hear the palm fronds rattle when the breeze blows through them. He thinks about how many meals he and Zach have eaten in this kitchen—a lot, but still not as many as he would have liked. He thinks about how Zach’s old kitchen has new people eating in it now, people who can’t possibly appreciate the memories that were made there.

“We’re drifting,” Chris says, almost to himself. “That’s why I’m upset. That’s why you’re upset. We’re not where we were five years ago. Six years ago.”

Zach takes a silent breath that pushes his shoulder more firmly against Chris’s. “Maybe that’s impossible. Maybe two people can’t be in the same place for five years.”

“Yeah, but...but I always thought we’d be in a better place. Not a worse one.” He can feel Zach’s eyes watching his profile, but he doesn’t turn to face him; he’s too much of a coward. “I thought we’d only get...closer.”

That makes Zach snort, which is surprising enough that Chris finally has to look at him. The derision in his expression is completely unexpected and completely devastating. Chris feels his stomach sink to his toes.

“Yeah, guess what, Christopher? People don’t just magically get closer. If you want that to happen, you have to work at it.” Chris opens his mouth to interrupt him, to plead his case, but Zach is on a roll and plows right over him. “You’ve been so caught up in your own shit. After the last press tour ended, I barely heard from you. You’re always too fucking busy. And, fine, that’s fine, if that’s how you want your life to be, but you can’t be surprised if you look up and realize you’ve left your friends in the dust.”

“I have friends,” Chris grumbles, even though he knows that’s not the point.

“Well, fine then. You have friends.” Zach pushes himself off the island and walks a few steps away. “What do you need me for?”

 _Because you’re Zach!_ he wants to yell, but he knows that’s not as much of an explanation as it feels like it should be. And yet it’s the only explanation he has. They are so intertwined in his head. They _belong_ to each other.

...They belong to each other.

So why did he fuck it up?

Zach is right about one thing: he left a lot of things in the dust. He’s been running for so long, trying to have a career he can be proud of, a life he can be proud of. And he _is_ proud of it. But just as he and Zach aren’t in the same place they were five years ago, he isn’t in the same place he was five years ago either. Then, the worst thing he could imagine was becoming tabloid fodder, having his craft overshadowed but the things people might say about him, or worse, about him and Zach. He’s not blind. He knows Zach cared about him then and cares about him now, in ways that go beyond just bros being bros. It scared him then. Now, other things scare him more.

His hand finds Zach’s shoulder of its own volition, and he squeezes and kneads until he can feel Zach slump, like he’s finally giving up. Thank God. Someone needs to.

“I miss you so much,” Zach whispers.

Chris has to fix this or he’ll die. Already his insides are ripping themselves apart, no doubt trying to put him out of his misery. But not yet. No, he has to do something first.

It feels like a memory, the way his palms fit Zach’s hips, like they’ve been there a thousand times before. Zach puts up a little resistance when Chris pushes him against the counter again, but only a little. His eyes are wide and scared in a way Chris has never seen them. It makes him want to lean in and kiss his eyelids and the crease in his brow, to soothe that tension away, but hopefully there will be time for that later. Hopefully he will be allowed.

“I want you to be in all my pictures, Zach,” he says, gripping him tight. “I don’t want anyone to be able to overlook what you mean to me.”

Zach shakes his head minutely. “Chris, that’s not—”

“I don’t want you to miss me,” he says, cutting Zach off. “And I don’t want to miss you. I don’t want to drift further apart. I don’t want to screw up anymore. Will you help me with that? Will you remind me if I forget?”

The clock ticks. The palm trees rattle. Zach’s breathing is loud and ragged, and his hands have found Chris’s chest, his fingers clutching Chris’s shirt. 

“Do you realize what you’re asking?” he says at last, his eyes falling closed for a moment and then opening again, like he had to make sure he wasn’t hallucinating.

Chris nods and nods and keeps nodding. “I want to be recognized, Zach. You and me.”

Zach drags him in, and their lips barely touch at first, their eyes still open like they have to be sure neither one of them is going to disappear. Zach’s breath tastes like cilantro, which is somehow perfectly right. If Chris had ever dreamed this, and he hasn’t, he would have guessed this was how it would happen—tacos in their bellies, Zach tasting like cilantro, palm trees and sunshine and Zach’s wide-open eyes up close. Then Zach’s hand finds the back of his neck, and Chris shuts his eyes and sinks into it and thinks about how this mouth is the last mouth he ever wants to feel pressed against his.


End file.
